This invention relates generally to instructional systems for teaching sports activities by recording a person's performance in the activity. In particular, this invention relates to a system and method for creating a personalized golf lesson video by recording a player's golf swing and inserting it and selected still frames thereof in various predetermined places in a prerecorded golf lesson video featuring a professional golfer.
Form and body position are important ingredients to success in many sports activities such as golf, baseball, and track. For example, proper positioning of the head, hands and golf club are crucial to a good golf swing. Naturally, the best way to practice proper positioning is under the direction of a professional golf instructor who can watch the player's swing and correct the player's position and motion. The player's swing can even be video recorded and reviewed later by the player and/or the instructor.
Systems have been proposed which record a player's swing and then analyze the swing according to precise principles. For example, a system described in U.S. Pat. No. 5,333,061 to Nakashima et al. converts recorded video images of a player's swing into a plurality of still images and superimposes on the still images correction pictures consisting of a series of lines connecting various points on the player's body and club. The resulting pictures are then recorded onto a videotape, and additional visual and/or audio information can then be added to the videotape.
Similarly, U.S. Pat. No. 5,111,410 to Nakayama et al. describes a motion diagnosis system in which retro-reflective tape is pasted onto a plurality of points on a player's body and golf club, the player's golf swing is recorded, images of the swing are sampled and converted to digital signals, and positional data is extracted from the plurality of points to which the tape was pasted. The positional data is then compared to reference data to create a diagnosis of the player's swing based on the difference between the positional and reference data.
As yet a further example, a system described in U.S. Pat. No. 4,891,748 to Mann captures a video image of a golf student's swing, generates a superior performance model golf player having physical dimensions scaled to those of the player, and overlays the image of the model onto the image of the student. The model is computer generated and includes composite average swing movements of a plurality of golf players, enhanced using statistical identification of the critical performance patterns of the swing.
These and other proposed systems fail to fully appreciate that, although proper positioning is important to a good swing, certain aspects of a player's position are more important than others. In fact, highly successful professional golfers have swings which differ in many ways from one another but which are similar in the basic fundamental aspects of a good golf swing. In addition, many aspects of a good swing are not visually apparent in the swing, such as proper weight distribution, tensioning and stretching of various muscles, and the feel of the swing. These aspects can best be communicated verbally from a professional golfer.
Thus, rather than providing a precise geometrical or statistical analysis of a player's swing, as accomplished by the systems described above, it is preferable to teach students which aspects of swing position are fundamentally important to a good swing and which aspects are merely matters of personal style. It is also preferable to communicate the non-visual aspects of a swing to students. One way to accomplish this is for an instructor to explain the basic fundamentals of a good swing while the student and instructor review the student's videotaped swing. However, such personalized instruction is expensive and time consuming, and thus inaccessible to a large portion of the general public.
Thus, a system is needed for providing instruction by a professional golfer on the basic fundamentals of a good swing while allowing students to view their own swings and compare the fundamentals to their swings. An example of the professional's swing should preferably be shown next to the student's swing to help students understand the fundamentals. Such a system should provide the professional the opportunity to explain the non-visual aspects of a swing. The system should be available to a mass population of golfers, and should provide the instruction in a form which allows students to carefully and repeatedly review the instruction at their own leisure and in the convenience of their own homes using standard commercially available video tape players.
The present invention provides such a system and solves these and other problems associated with existing golf video systems.